The Prophetic Lens

The Camera and Black Moral Agency from MLK to Darnella Frazier

Phil Allen

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781506484198
• eBook ISBN:
  9781506484204
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Politics
• Index: Social Sciences

Martin Luther King used news cameras as a means of exposing anti-Black violence by white mobs in the 1950s and 60s. Darnella Frazier used her phone to record and post the murder of George Floyd by Derek Chauvin in May 2020. These are just two of many people who have captured images of injustice for the world to see.

The Prophetic Lens takes an important look at the use of the video camera as an indispensable prophetic tool for the security of Black lives and greater possibility for racial justice. Phil Allen shows how the camera can be a catalyst for cultural change, using Walter Brueggemann's Prophetic Imagination as a framework for understanding the concept of "prophetic." Chronicling the use of the camera, particularly in film from J.D. Griffiths' Birth of a Nation to Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, Allen's historical approach reveals how effective this technology has been in achieving the goals of its respective storytellers.

The book highlights both the prophetic potential of the camera and the context of Blackness as a liminal existence amid a context dominated by whiteness.

Chapter 1

Unseen Violence

Blackness as the “In-Between”

It is a cold morning in December in Southern California, and I prepare for a long run to start my day. I get dressed in the appropriate gear to make sure I stay relatively warm from start to finish. I put on my sneakers, my Nike Therma compression tights, and a long-sleeve T-shirt underneath a light sweatshirt, and then I hesitate for a moment before covering my head. Every time I put a “skull” cap (beanie) on my head, I think about how I’m perceived when I encounter people even while running. I dare not pull a hood over my head. I think twice about wearing a skull cap every time I grab one to cover my head, especially at night. I wear them anyway if the weather requires it. The fact that I must think about it is troubling to me. I remember vividly the description given to the police in 1999 as I walked to the bus stop on a cold Maryland morning. I had done nothing, yet a White man saw me as suspicious in my own neighborhood. My body was seen, but my humanity was not. His view of me seemed informed by his biases and fear.

Some days I feel invisible, while other days I feel the weight of the “gaze” of whiteness upon me. This long look, in my mind, ranges from a gaze of curiosity to one of surveillance, from fetishism to disdain. I feel the weight of having to posture myself in such a way that counters the invisibility of my humanity that my black skin seemingly overshadows in a culture founded on racialized ideology. In that hierarchy, blackness anchors it at the bottom. It is the racial code and the meanings attached to it that were imposed on African identity and upon which whiteness has stood to build its status, its prosperity, and its social security. In between racial slurs and lynched bodies, discriminatory acts caught on audio or video and anti-Black violence are part of the everyday mundane reality of microaggressions and microtraumas that describe being Black and navigating White spaces.1

I imagine the Underground Railroad as a space between being enslaved and “almost” free. It was in the hiddenness of this space that Harriet Tubman courageously led enslaved Africans north to “freedom.” The Underground Railroad stands as a metaphor for the existential reality of blackness even today. The anxiety and fear of being caught and taken back to the perpetual “hell on earth” of Southern slavery and the simultaneous hopefulness of reaching the destination that represents freedom—both had to have been palpable. Their bodies and minds living in that tension without a reprieve until the destination was reached. The inner turmoil of resisting the temptation to turn back and the eagerness to finally get to the “promised land.” It is a reality of suffering, anticipation, faith, and resiliency. Could the Underground Railroad experience be an active metaphor for that “in-between,” liminal existence for African Americans that tends to be unseen by or of little concern to White Americans?

What does it mean to be Black in the United States? What does it feel like in one’s body? Is there any difference between being Black and being White or another person of Color? These are legitimate questions to reflect upon. But what is also important to ask is, “What does it feel like to live a reality, tell that reality, and have the narrative of that reality not believed or taken seriously?”

One evening as I spoke with a White woman in Southern California, we happened on the topic of slavery. I shared a bit of the history with her, and somehow in the midst of my sharing, she found a way to highlight one particular ex-slave who managed to buy his freedom from his owner. She spoke of his experience with a mild, relatively kind (for the times) owner as if that was the normal experience of slavery for millions of Africans. She said, “Well, at least he didn’t treat him too badly.” Her response shocked me, but I could also tell she honestly had no clue about the truth regarding slavery—though this does not justify her comment. Unfortunately, this is not an uncommon view of not just slavery but the entire history of the Black experience.

For far too many people, the Black experience—from slavery to Jim Crow, to mass incarceration and police brutality, to institutional racism in every sector of society in the United States—remains hovering in a type of social ether in which its reality is unfelt, unseen, and in fact, unknown. Particularly for many White Americans, this “violence of abstraction” justifies the assumption that the Black experience is only distinct from the White American experience by choice, not by design. The choice to commit crimes that impose deserved prison sentences, to not work hard enough to attain the promised American dream, or to dwell on an irrelevant past of a time that should be long forgotten.

The trauma of our past must first be seen and understood in order to appreciate the plight of blackness in the United States today. Maybe the reason blackness is not widely felt or known is because it is an unseen or undiscerned reality outside of the Black community. When I use the term liminal, I mean it is more than just unseen; it is an “in-between” existence. In other words, to be Black is to be in-between (seen as) human and (treated as) nonhuman. To be Black is to be in-between visible (admiration of Black bodies and culture that entertain or labor for White prosperity) and invisible (apathy toward Black suffering so as to not disturb White conscience). To render blackness invisible means to not acknowledge Black presence, Black thought, Black agency, or even Black humanity until any of these expressions of blackness are perceived to be a threat.

Blackness is the unseen space between violence and resilience. Violence should not be understood exclusively as physical, but its range of application is relevant to comprehending the extent to which blackness has been under assault in the United States for hundreds of years. The word violent means “to have a powerful effect.”2 The effect usually results in harm, injury, or death. Further, violence is related to violation—to treat with irreverence, profanity, or dishonor.3 Racial violence, however, is not always noticeable. Racist laws and policies have been historically violent to the African American community. The codified and unwritten/unspoken practice of assimilation is injurious to African Americans’ individual and collective identity. Unwarranted punishment—whipping, lynching, burning at the stake, dismemberment, police brutality, and so on—as a means of social control and flexing White dominance psychologically and physically is not merely harmful but destructive and dehumanizing. The ghettoization—isolation and/or segregation—is dishonoring and destructive to the community and is a root cause for social, familial, economic, and educational death. Despite the shadow of White violence that hovers over blackness, African Americans have endured it all through faith, community, activism, creativity and improvisation, and play—sports, comedy, dance, and so on.

Blackness is the unseen space of always fighting for or being stuck in the threshold of cultural change, hoping for more equity, equality, and just treatment. It is an in-between space because this progress is always incremental, since inherently anti-Black power structures have always been at play with counterresistance to and nonacceptance of Black social movements. What’s worse is the fact that this space, while it is a lived reality for African Americans, is largely hidden or ignored by White Americans. One important ethic of blackness is its ability to innovate ways in which this experience is no longer hidden in order to creatively prick the collective conscience of the nation, including those within the African American community who may have been lulled to sleep by progress, Black exceptionalism/excellence, or the illusion of a postracial society.

Blackness as the “in-between” is necessarily a space of subversive and restorative practices. The health, survival, and progress of African Americans are dependent upon the capacity to marry practice with theory in what Peter Paris calls a “surrogate world.”4 During the Jim Crow era, the areas of society where African Americans could not participate or were afforded limited participation—in voting, government, leadership, and so on—in one sense felt like an abyss where Black voices were unheard and Black humanity was unrecognized, blending in with a background of deep nothingness. In another sense, the “surrogate world” was created for and by African Americans as a space of safety, affirming Black dignity, strategizing for Black flourishing, and worshipping a God of liberation taken from the clutches of white supremacy that presented and worshipped a God of Black oppression. Women, the poor, LGBTQ+, and differently abled people are marginalized groups as well, but the intersection of these groups with a Black identity further intensifies their marginalization. Restorative practices as resources for wellness are inherently subversive because they undermine the intended destructive effects of social structures upon African Americans that are inextricably rooted in white supremacy. These practices foster resiliency and healing amid social structures that dehumanize.

Blackness as the invisible “in-between” is a dark space, but it is also a creative space. African Americans, performing those subversive practices, have creatively found ways to not only survive but thrive. The story of blackness is told through our music. Our songs enliven the various shades of our black and brown bodies to dance as a form of resistance and restoration. African Americans embody a theology and ethic of play that is most understood in the surrogate world of blackness. From the Geechee utterances of the Gullah dialect in the Lowcountry region of South Carolina—once viewed as a dialect of the uneducated—to the countless stanzas of poetry and hip-hop music, the in-between space of blackness is life-giving out of necessity. It has been appropriated to become a space of divine, creative performance. Like God created the earth out of nothing, so it has been with blackness—ex nihilo, out of nothing—still becoming something good. It is the ever-evolving story of this human goodness, marred by White oppression, that must be seen and heard.

“I Want the World to See What They Did to My Boy”

In 1955, Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old African American kid from Chicago, was visiting family in Money, Mississippi. He was accused of either whistling and/or saying, “Hey baby!” to a White woman named Carolyn Bryant while he was making a purchase at a local grocery store. The young woman’s husband, Roy Bryant, and brother-in-law, J. W. Milam, went in search of Till with murderous intentions to avenge the alleged dishonoring of a White woman. Bryant and Milam arrived at Till’s uncle Moses Wright’s home demanding that young Till come outside. They proceeded to kidnap and torture him. After beating Till, they shot him in the head, tied a metal fan with barbed wire around his neck, and threw his body into the Tallahatchie River, where he was later discovered.

Bryant and Milam were later accused of the murder and brought to trial. During the trial, Till’s uncle Moses Wright testified of the abduction, and a man named Willie Reed testified that he overheard the men torturing young Till.5 In spite of their testimonies, an all-White jury found them not guilty after an hour of deliberation. In 1956, after being acquitted of murder, the two men confessed to a journalist from Look magazine that they had in fact killed Till. What irony is the magazine’s name, Look? Where did the article that contained the audacious confessions of the two men direct its readers to look? Were readers directed to “look” at the two White men with disdain or admiration for their actions? Was it simply to get readers to look at and purchase a copy of the magazine with a compelling article? Was the author asking the readers to look at or imagine Emmett Till’s disfigured body? What would have happened if Reed had a video camera to capture the torture and present as evidence? What effect would video footage have had on the jury and the judge despite the blatancy of white supremacy during the Jim Crow era?

What happened to Till was not uncommon but was indicative of the Black experience in the United States since the seventeenth century. Much of that experience, familiar to African Americans, has had its images edited from the textbooks, the history lessons, the sermons, and the stories passed down from generation to generation of non-Black, and especially White, communities—so much so that any account of history that emphasizes or merely includes the terror of the African American lived reality is challenged as some type of historical heresy proclaimed against the United States. African Americans have been telling their perspectives of this history since slavery through the voices of figures such as Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, W. E. B. Du Bois, the narratives of the enslaved, and other historians. These accounts, testimonies, and perspectives challenge White-dominant narratives of US history. The de- and reconstructive work continues today. Nikole Hannah-Jones and the other contributors to The 1619 Project shine a light on the unseen, unheard, unfelt, and unknown reality that is “blackness” in order to reintroduce this historical narrative and this people to those whose mental and visual lenses have been veiled by whiteness. Many conservative White (and non-White) Americans see this as a threat and work tirelessly to condemn The 1619 Project as Marxist ideology and blackball it from school curricula and libraries. But why is it a threat?

It is not US history that is threatened, nor is it the image of the United States as the greatest nation on earth. I suggest it is whiteness that is most threatened by the project’s objective to “reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the center of our national narrative.”6 To know the United States is to know how whiteness in general, and white supremacy more specifically, has organized society around itself. To know the United States is to not turn away at the White violence and terror toward people of Color. To know the United States is to sit in the discomfort of the fallacy of white superiority that prioritizes, values, and centers whiteness—White bodies, White thought, White interests, and so on—that has socialized all of its inhabitants.

The Violent In-Between

For more than two hundred years, enslaved Africans were chained together and congested in the belly of European slave ships like cargo. Millions of Africans spent months in the traumatic liminal space uncertain of their destination or fate. In the hole of the deck on the slave ships was the smell of death that accompanied them on their travels to foreign lands. For millions of Africans who did not die on the journey to the slave ships on the West coast of Africa, life (if we can call it that) on the ships would be but a temporary existence before a life (if we can call it that) of forced free labor and brutality under White oppression in a new country became the norm. For millions of others, it would be the place where they would take their last breaths. Some would be thrown into the ocean after dying from sickness while others would choose the water in suicidal desperation, trusting that their souls would be reunited with the ancestors. Either way, they would become food for stalking sharks as shark migration patterns shifted to follow the ships headed West.7

The belly of the slave ships was an unseen Black reality. The Middle Passage was the space in between the homeland of Africa and the New World of the Americas and the Caribbean (British sugar islands). It was in between life and death, freedom and captivity, humanity and inhumanity, and being and nonbeing. It forced enslaved Africans at the time to have to choose one (life) or the other (death) before any human should have had to make such a choice, and in ways that no human should have to be subjected to.

Enslaved Africans were haunted by the decision to choose suicide over a life of forced servitude in a strange land. One enslaved African, whose name is unknown, tried to explain to the crew how he and his family were wrongfully enslaved. From the time he was held captive on the ship until his death, he refused to eat. He attempted suicide by cutting his own throat. The crew and doctor managed to save his life only to learn of a second attempt the next night. He chose death over going “with white men” into slavery.8

This unseen reality on the slave ship inspired many to fight for their freedom to the death—or the death of their White captors—through planned insurrections. While the slave ship intrinsically had a dual function in that it served as a mobile prison for the human beings of African descent but also transported cargo—textiles, firearms, gold, and ivory—one could argue for a third function: the birth of Black social mov...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Unseen Violence: Blackness as the “In-Between”
• Chapter 2: Unseen Violator: Unveiling Whiteness
• Chapter 3: Unfiltered Lies: White Framing of the Black Narrative
• Chapter 4: Uncovered Truth: A Prophetic Alternative
• Chapter 5: King and the Cameraman
• Chapter 6: The Democratization of the Camera
• Chapter 7: When the Bystander Aims and Shoots
• Chapter 8: Dramatizing Blackness: Black Filmmakers Retelling the Narrative
• Chapter 9: Documenting the Image: The Power of the Visual
• Conclusion
• Notes